I was reading a news item recently about another startup in the marketing analytics space. This startup analyzes eye movements as customers browse in a store and, based on that, tries to determine the customer's interest in certain items, which triggers email offers to their mobile phones in real time. Wow. I hope that company lists clients on its website so I know where not to shop.

Why is email so recession-proof? We've seen it thrive in the years following the dot-com bust of the early 2000s. We saw it go through the roof after CAN SPAM. It's taken on every challenger there is and keeps growing 10% a year in marketing spend.

The email marketing industry has been fascinated with the innovations happening in the inbox over the past couple years, and especially those being led by Gmail. The Promotions Tab, the unsubscribe feature, grid view, image caching, quick actions, the Inbox app and the soon-to-be-launched Google payments functionality called Pony Express are changing the way consumers engage with email.

"Customer journey" is perhaps today's hottest marketing buzz phrase, but it has the potential to revolutionize your email program and deliver better results for your customer as well as your own bottom line.

In 2003, several contributors from Amazon wrote a compelling industry report on "Amazon.com Recommendations, Item to Item Collaborative Filtering." While Amazon has long set the standard for product recommendations, personalization and doing it at scale, no one could have imagined that data would outgrow humans' ability to slice-and-dice and generate insights from it.

Back in January, I posted the first in a series of email tips filtered through the lens of advice I give my nine-year-old daughter. The first piece of advice was focused on the fact that not everyone is going to like you. Today, I want to focus on an extension of that advice with tip No. 2: You only need a few good friends.

As an email marketer, you know that getting mobile right is essential for an effective digital marketing program. But maybe your boss still isn't convinced. How about a few numbers to show why mobile matters -- and why email should own it?

Twenty years ago, if you wanted a marketing piece to look good, you had to go to a professional graphics service to get it typeset, and then a printer to get it printed. Now everybody can do that on a PC. But then again, you can now use purpose-built templates to make your own just-about-anything: really good-looking marketing pieces, websites, emails, you name it. In other words, you can go a long way for a lot less time and money these days. For the most part, if you're a marketer seeking to improve marketing effectiveness by taking advantage of the ...